At some point in the dimmest recesses of forgotten antiquity, the beauty, durability, and imperviousness of a heated mixture of sand, soda, and limestone was recognized and the ancients began to fashion vessels of this material. The earliest method of forming glass into useful articles consisted of blowing the glass into a bubble, an operation which naturally formed a vessel mouth and a chamber. Both the mouth and the chamber itself were necessary results of the glass blowing operation which generally involved the use of air pressure to establish a deformation of molten viscous glassy material, usually after an initial mechanical operation establishing starting structures for the glass blowing operation. Upon the application of air pressure to the glass, it is driven outward and, essentially, inflated and expanded to form a bubble which extends around and surrounds the source of air pressure. In the simplest case, this bubble may simply be allowed to harden or may be flattened on the side opposite the mouth through which the air pressure was applied, thus forming a natural bottle shape.
Judging by the archeological record, at a very early point the advantages of adding a neck at the entrance to the chamber formed by the glass blowing bubble was recognized. This structure had the advantage of providing the neck portion of the vessel with increased wall thickness useful in supporting a stopper of wood or other similar material while at the same time providing a surface for easy gripping by a single hand of a user.
Such vessels were a substantial advance in technology when they were first introduced. They allowed one to see the contours of the vessel while at the same time allowing for storage of materials for longer periods of time. More particularly, due to the impermeability of the vessel sidewalls to gas, glass vessels prevented the introduction of oxygen into the vessel and thereby promoted preservation, while at the same time preventing the material on the inside of the vessel from escaping by means of evaporation. At the same time, such vessels had surfaces which were easy to clean and could be effectively sterilized by merely being placed in the sun, a common practice until relatively recently when more energy intensive procedures came into use.
Notwithstanding these advantages, the long neck of glass and similar containers, even today, poses a significant waste problem when such containers are filled with relatively highly viscous materials such as honey, ketchup, maple syrup, sauce and other commonly used foods as well as such non-food materials as shampoo, lotions, and the like.
More particularly, because of the shape of the bottle, which persists to this day in its ancient form, such viscous materials tend to flow to the bottom of the bottle and accumulate there. When only a relatively small amount of material remains in such a bottle, such accumulations tend to be in relatively thin layers. Because of the relatively thin accumulations of such material, the combination of adhesion to the bottle, cohesion within the material and viscosity results in a condition where such material has a natural tendency to remain in place. This condition is reinforced by the absence of fluidic pressure promoted by the contents of the bottle when the bottle is full or very nearly full.
As a consequence, if one wishes to remove the contents of such a bottle filled with a relatively small amount of relatively highly viscous material, the removal of the material is sometimes extremely difficult.
In an effort to address this problem, a number of artifices are employed. One approach is simply to invert the vessel and wait for the material to flow. While such flow times are relatively long, the bottle may be inverted and sometimes delicately balanced to allow material to flow to the inverted top of the vessel. However, this is often a precarious and dangerous thing to do, especially in the case of a glass bottle.
Another approach is to simply store the bottle on its side. However, this approach is only a compromise solution is ineffective unless there is substantially more than a minimal amount of material remaining in the bottle.
In an effort to address such problems, bottle support devices for supporting bottles in an inverted orientation have been proposed. However, such devices have failed to see any widespread employment due to a variety of problems, including stability and adaptability to a range of bottle shapes. Adaptability is no small matter, insofar as such devices are in use only a very small percentage of the time during which the bottle with which they are employed, is used. Moreover, such devices must have a versatility which allows them to be employed in a wide variety of locations where bottles may be used or stored.